Attendees of a meeting, whether participating in person or remotely, will often make notations about the meeting. For example, an attendee will commonly make a record of who did or did not attended the meeting, of when and where the meeting occurred, of what was discussed or presented, and/or of what related action items require follow-up after the meeting. This is certainly a non-exclusive list of potential meeting notations.
It is very common for a meeting attendee to handwrite meeting notes. It then requires significant effort to clean up the notes, transfer them to a typed digital format, and to then share the notes with meeting participants, which is often desired. These processes require a significant investment of time and energy. Further, tasks associated with these processes often require switching between multiple different software tools such as email and calendar tools. Still further, substantial effort is often required to search for and identify the original meeting invitees and/or to obtain content or other documentation (e.g., a slide deck) distributed or presented during the meeting. Finally, it is particularly cumbersome to accumulate and consolidate meeting-related information and documentation from any or all meeting participants, especially when such information is produced and/or distributed before or after the meeting has been conducted.
This is not to say that there have not been attempts to address some of the challenges associated with accumulating meeting documentation and notations. Some online and in-person meetings are audio and/or video recorded. In such cases, users may at least feel relieved of the burden of having to take handwritten notes. However, to have a text record of the meeting, a human or some sort of automated or semi-automated technology is depended upon to transcribe what was spoken during the meeting. This dependence is limited in terms of convenience and practicality. For example, the generated transcriptions are unlikely to be summarized and therefore can be quite lengthy, which means a relatively large amount of time is required for consumption of the information.
Currently, there are online meeting applications that provide meeting participants with an area for entering notes. However, significant effort is still required to handle and process the created notes. For example, tasks such as emailing the notes out to others (e.g., other meeting participants) or further editing the notes with specialized text editing tools often requires exporting the notes to another application. Further, the notes recorded in these electronic environments are generally limited to being user-generated during the meeting itself or immediately thereafter, before the online meeting application is closed.